Le niveau de charbon est un paramètre process important pour la productivité et le graphitage des fours de la batterie. La mesure des hauteurs de chargement est nécessaire pour ajuster les paramètres de l’enfourneuse. La méthode manuelle avec une pige graduée n’est plus acceptable pour l’environnement et les conditions de travail des opérateurs. Chaque enfourneuse de Dunkerque est équipée de quatre radars qui permettent des mesures répétitives en automatique avec une précision du millimètre. Malgré les conditions difficiles (chaleur, poussière, gaz…), le radar embarqué permet d’obtenir des mesures fiables.

Blast furnace models are fundamental tools that interpret many of the phenomena occurring inside the reactor. They can be either diagnosis or predictive, but they require available measurements to validate their outputs. One of the roles of the different R&D Labs of the ArcelorMittal Group is to develop, validate, apply and continuously improve the models for blast furnace operations and analysis. The users' feedback is one important key to success.

Based on practice, the main factors affecting the process of EAF with De-P HM charging have been theoretically analyzed, such as using oxygen, the material charging and making slag. Based on the process features of EAF with De-P HM charging, EAF productivity increase was achieved with application of the integrated control theory on EAF process in Baosteel Stainless Steel Branch.

Good stability of the steel strip is essential in galvanizing lines, especially in the rapid cooling section before the zinc bath, where the strip is cooled and excited by high-speed gas jets.
The process parameters and the design have been investigated in order to characterize the strip vibrations phenomena and to define optimized solutions for improving the cooling performances of present and future galvanizing lines while reducing the strip fluttering in the rapid cooling zone as well as in the cooling tower.

Due to recent nickel price volatility, ferritic stainless steels, having no or very low nickel content, can be very interesting to stainless steels users. Ferritic represents only about 26% of the total stainless steel production nowadays. The paper presents the ferritic stainless steel family: mechanical properties of the grade including drawability as well as corrosion resistance properties. Experimental data of the newly developed 20% Cr ferritic grade are discussed and compared to the properties of existing 200 and 300 series grades. High temperature properties of ferritic stainless steels designed for exhaust systems are also presented.

An approach is proposed for the evaluation of surface fatigue damage of hot forming tools that undergo severe thermo mechanical loading. Fatigue crack propagation in a hot work tool steel X38CrMoV5-47HRC is investigated using singleedge cracked tension specimens with 3 different thicknesses (2.5, 1, 0.6 mm) and two R-values. The stress intensity factor is evaluated with ABAQUS®. Paris curves are established for the crack propagation experiments.